Practical Run-Time Mitigations Against Data-Oriented Attacks

Data-oriented exploits are growing in popularity as defenders are closing attack vectorsrelated to control flow exploits. Data Oriented Programming (DOP), a generalization of data-oriented attacks,stitches together data-oriented gadgets and can perform Turing-complete computations in memory. Besides,data-oriented exploits modify the behavior of the program without violating its control flow, andtherefore cannot be stopped by ubiquitous control flow mitigations such as Data Execution Prevention (DEP),Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) and Control Flow Integrity (CFI).A unified solution cannot address all memory corruption errors as there are different classes of memory corruptionerrors and each of them requires careful considerations. The arguments to variadic functions in C and C++ cannot bestatically type-checked by the compiler and therefore expose a significant memory corruption attack surface.In this dissertation, we present a comprehensive approach thateffectively type-checks variadic function arguments and thus addresses the attacks that exploit variadic functionrelated memory corruption errors. Our evaluation shows that our solution is practicalas the measured overhead is negligible (0.45%) and effective as we show in several case studies.To prevent data-oriented exploits fromdeterministically corrupting program data, a probabilistic fine-grained randomization defense Data Space Randomization(DSR) was proposed. DSR randomizes the representation of program data in memory to prevent illegitimate usage of data.DSR employs static analysis to classify data objects into equivalenceclasses. DSR works by masking memory load and store instructions using XOR operations.Masks are chosen (i) to not interfere with intended data flows and (ii) such that masking likelyinterferes with unintended flows introduced by malicious program inputs.We show using two new DSR bypass attacks, one that directly discloses memory and another using speculative execution,that the existing DSR defenses are still not secure. We then improve upon the state ofthe art DSR and propose the first dynamic DSR scheme resilient to disclosure attacks. Our mitigation continuouslyrerandomizes the masks used in loads and stores, and re-masks all memory objects to remain transparent w.r.t.program execution. Our evaluation confirms that our approach successfully thwarts these attacks with limitedrun-time overhead in standard benchmarks as well as real-world applications